The Spaces in Between (25 page)

A large blue splotch covered his field of vision, but around it Cameron could see his reflection claw its way out the mirror. Outside the mirror Cameron could not make out any details in the appearance of his reflection as it was shrouded in darkness. No details aside from the glaring red left eye. He responded by uncovering his own left eye. They both visualized an intricate set of circles surrounding themselves that appeared immediately.

Cameron drew the sword from his side. It was no longer a cutlass, but a katana. However instead of having the usual katana finger guard and ray-skin wrapped handle the handle was the ornate carved filigree of a cutlass. His reflection did the same. They plunged their swords into the ground and uttered incantations that made the
Sephirot
almost shudder away from them.

A wisp of black smoke leaked from the red eyes, and then began to pour out of all the facial orifices. The darkness floated to the outside of the circles and swirled through the air. Once the darkness stopped flowing it took the shape of a huge black mastiff. The huge dogs stood across from each other, but neither made a single move. These dogs were Watchers – guardians of the Old Ones who resided outside of creation. It was with this creature that Cameron hurt Lam so grievously. They are bound by a pact to help humans in dealings with the Old Ones, but loathe doing so. Above all, they never act against each other.

This is your lower self. What you must give up to pass through Tiphareth. How is it that you plan to destroy your shadow with your darkness?
Said Cameron’s own voice inside his head, but he was positive that he wasn’t the one using it. He could argue the point that a shadow can’t exist in pure darkness either, but did he have enough? Whatever darkness he could use against his shadow self it certainly could too. The only difference really was the divinity in Cameron.

For a mage accessing their divine self was one of the greatest goals. Also known as the Abramelin Operation it took an entire month of isolation and ritual in order to achieve. Obviously most failed. The last step after making contact with the divine self was to summon all the personal demons and bind them to your will with the divine self. The course was clear to Cameron, but he probably didn’t have a month to spare. Fortunately, for Cameron, he wasn’t just the average mage.

Cameron began incanting the Invocation of the Bornless One as written by Aleister Crowley. He had never read it before, and without his memory it wouldn’t matter if he ever did. The Universe remembered it and trickled each line into Cameron’s brain down his connection to the Akashic Records. His shadow shifted its weight from foot to foot, because it couldn’t come up with a way to respond.

Tendrils of white light seeped from under the eye patch covering his right eye as he vibrated the barbarous words as Crowley called them. Nonsense words whose job was only to clear the mind. When he finished there was a flash of light that knocked his shadow on its ass. The light rose off of Cameron like steam. It had come, but was slowly dissipating. Cameron chanted the release ritual for the Watcher and pulled the sword from the ground. His Watcher vanished and his shadow’s tensed on the balls of its paws. He couldn’t tell, but Cameron was sure that his shadow was grinning. Cameron moved the eye patch back over his left.

The Watcher pounced and crashed against circles surrounding Cameron. The circle shuddered, but held. He started the Bornless One ritual again. He winced each time the Watcher crashed against his circle, but he focused on the words those meaningless phrases became the only thing that mattered. Really nothing was the only thing that mattered. White light leaked from all the orifices in Cameron’s face.

He stepped outside of the circles. The Watcher dived at him in an almost light speed. Cameron snatched the Watcher from mid-air scruffing it as one would a puppy. The Watcher growled and howled in pain at the touch. Cameron opened his mouth, and the white light streamed out as he uttered the Watcher Banishment ritual. The Watcher shattered and Cameron flicked the last few shards of darkness from his fingertips.

His shadow clawed through the air. His fingers became long tendrils that lacerated Cameron’s skin. Cameron winced at the pain, but just started chanting the barbarous words. He didn’t bother with the rest of the Bornless One rite. Light leaked out of the slashes on Cameron’s chest. His aura flared and pressed against the protection circles surrounding his shadow.

His shadow flicked the tendrils again, but they didn’t make it any farther than Cameron’s aura this time. Cameron crossed the bamboo poles and continued chanting the barbarous words. Light poured out of his head like he was a Jack-O-Lantern with an angel trapped inside or at least a floodlight. The outer circle of his shadow shattered against the pressure from Cameron’s aura as he approached. The markings bent back and finally snapped. The Pirate King approached the inner circle with all the wrath and fury of an Angel. He placed his hands at each side of his face like he was a vampire seducing a new victim.

Cameron shook his hands in the air like a prisoner shaking the bars of his cage. The markings of the inner circle strained and thinned until they finally snapped. The light poured in and Cameron stood over his shadow. It groveled before him at his feet as it always should. If he could turn up the light inside him he thought he could destroy his shadow forever, but the voice inside his head that was both his and not his own spoke again.
You cannot destroy your shadow, but now you may leave it behind.

Cameron could feel the edges of the Tarot pressing against his palm. He opened his hand and the card unfolded in his palm. The door opened in the air before him and he passed through.

19

Hades sat despondent on his throne of bones. He sipped his wine goblet full of blood and sniffled.

“That monster killed my dog…” he muttered. He saw the other man approach out of his peripheral vision, because that was about the only way he could see anymore with the locks of black hair slicked over his eyes. “What do you want?”

“This is the Sephirot of
Yesod
,” the man replied, “Is it not?”

20

The Adjustment door swung shut behind Cameron. Upon it Lady Justice held a great sword and balanced scales dangled from her hair. He looked up at the path before him. His stomach sank at the passing from the middle of equilibrium heading up to the middle of the Pillar of Severity. Before Cameron was a sawmill wheel slowly rotating. No water turned the wheel, and that might actually be a mercy to him.

Cameron stood at the foot of the wheel. One of the wheel’s paddles slowly passed over his head and then into the shadows. He was pretty sure that he didn’t want to go into that darkness. Those that fall into the darkness fall on their ass at the very bottom of the Tree.

He jumped and grasped the top of the next paddle that passed overhead. Cameron quickly scrambled over the paddle before it passed into darkness. He crouched and his legs pistoned. He squatted on the next paddle and quickly glanced behind him. His overcoat had billowed behind him when he made the leap and now he was missing the bottom of it.

He quickly sprang over the next paddle and his fingers grasped the paddle overhead. He pressed his feet into the wheel’s frame and he slowly walked his way up to the top. He was lying on his stomach at the top of the paddle. Cameron pushed himself into sitting and realized that he lost any head start he got from skipping that paddle.

He focused his eye on the top and allowed his feet to figure out the correct way. He quickly hopped from paddle to paddle three times. The fourth was horizontal overhead. He grabbed hold and pulled himself up. Then again to the fifth, but on the sixth his toes slipped from under him. He dangled over the darkness and tried not to look down though he damn well knew that there was nothing to see down there. And that was frightening.

His feet dipped into the darkness and it chilled Cameron all the way to the top of his head. He quickly scrambled up the paddle and climbed to the next one. His form fitting socks where now missing. He made it up three more paddles before his feet slick with the liquid darkness failed him again. This time when his arms went taunt his fingers also failed him. Before he fell Cameron spotted the Hebrew letter
Lamed
branded on the paddle. His back struck the third paddle down.

There was a sickening crack. His muscles throbbed and burned in rage at working them so. The entire act of climbing this slow moving wheel seemed so futile now. Cameron snapped into focus and immediately mended his back then began coaxing his arms and legs to move again.

Move, God dammit! You aren’t real!
Unfortunately his aching muscles did not believe him.
You will move on the count of three or so God help me!
The paddle descended further.
One.
His fingers brushed against the surface of the darkness.
Two.
His arms and legs dangling over the edged of the paddle behind him plunged into the darkness below.
Three!
They jerked back out of the darkness and Cameron pulled himself back to standing. His arms were bare to the elbow and his legs were bare to the knee.

He hugged the wheel’s interior frame and started to shimmy up like a kid on a rope in gym class. His ascent was stopped in more ways than one. He found himself unable to travel forward as his hakama had become caught on a nail.
Why was there even a nail on this thing? This was probably made in one whole piece!
His aching muscles failed him again.
Move!
His legs jerked with little effect.

His feet went into the darkness again. It wasn’t as cold as it was before. The darkness was cool and soothing to his muscles now. The relief started moving up his leg instead, and he allowed the wheel to push him down. Now plunged into the darkness he could finally relax. If there was oxygen on the higher levels of the Tree and if he actually needed it anymore he was pretty sure he’d be able to breathe this darkness. He looked overhead and he could see the ground under him.

It was not a very far distance, and he floated down to the bottom. His feet fell softly to the ground.

“It’s very foolish to try to fight the great wheel of Karma,” a man’s voice said to Cameron. “It always wins in the end. Karma doesn’t care what you’ve done – good or bad. It simply acts. It has no mind or heart to speak of.”

Cameron drew the revolver from his belt. He was surprised to find that everything was intact, and after a quick scan of the ground he found scattered cloth and socks. There was the crackling report of a gun and it spat fire from a direction that Cameron could not discern. His own revolver shuddered when the bullet struck the barrel. The barrel flung off and the cylinder rolled out. Bullets clattered to the ground.

He could now make out the outline of a man in a wide-brimmed hat approaching him. The handle of his gun fell to the ground, and his hand snapped over to the handle of his sword that he drew with the speed of a gunslinger. The other’s gun crackled again, and the katana snapped at the hilt. The blade whirled in the air and clattered to the ground out of Cameron’s sight.

“So this is it?” Cameron yelled. “Are you going to make me take a new body and a new life?” He held the hilt like he could still fend the attacker off with it. “Because I couldn’t make it to
Geburah
!”

“You did make it to
Geburah
,” the other said gravely, “because you finally let Karma overtake you. You never had a choice in the matter, and your journey will still end here.”

21

The man continued approaching and Cameron could recognize him finally. The man wore a wide-brimmed hat covering his face and a huge duster. At each of his hips hung a massive revolver with sandalwood grips whose fragrance could still reach Cameron’s nostrils even after what looked like centuries of usage. Where he had seen this man before was on the cover of a novel he read when he was fourteen -
The Gunslinger
by Stephen King.

Cameron had first heard of Stephen King when
IT
made its television debut. He was instructed by his father to not turn on ABC for the next couple of nights. Using the small TV in his room, of course, Cameron did watch
IT
but it didn’t exactly have the same affect as accidentally catching
Dreamcatcher
had on his sister at that age. Was it ironic that two of the stories involving Derry had such profound effects on the siblings? She was terrified of going to the bathroom for months afterward. The lengthy flashbacks actually did quite a number to Cameron’s attention span that would prevent him from reading books in the future, but he became a Stephen King fan that day.

Mostly because his father told him not to be one.
The Gunslinger
was the only book that his father ever bought for him by Stephen King. He had avoided it since it was in the Science Fiction section, the ghetto of the fiction section in any bookstore. He had avoided it for the exact same reason that his father bought it for him – there was a cowboy on the cover. Western novels were to old men what Romance novels were to old women. A close inspection side by side reveals almost the same covers. The title character of the
Spur
series was never featured with fewer than two women on the cover of each serial.

He found the dreamlike narrative hard to follow and if he had to recall any part of that story he would come blank like trying to recall a dream so late after having it. Still he loved every word of it. His attention span would only propel him through three more of the
Dark Tower
books until he failed in his own quest for the Dark Tower.